Life These Days…

Lately, my life feels like a bit of a roller coaster ride.  There have been a few steep climbs, followed by several drops.    The months of May and June have not turned out quite like I’d envisioned.  I’m tired, I’m weary and worn, and it’s not just from working in the garden!  I’m weary and worn just from dealing with life, these days.

Lately, Ed and I seem to be surrounded by stress and strife.  I don’t know if God is testing us or if Satan is tempting us, but, lately, strife has been all around us!  This isn’t the kind of  stress and strife we had last year, when Ed lost his job, or we discovered we had termites and mold in our house.  This is the kind of stress and strife where certain family members are mad with certain other family members.  When things get done and said, and a molehill morphs into a mountain.  My head aches just thinking about it all.  Can’t we all just get along?  Apparently not.

The other day, I read a church sign that said, “Self control begins with tongue control.”  Believe me, truer words have never been spoken!  It’s so easy for the wrong words to flow out of our mouths, sometimes,  but it’s SO hard to put those words behind us once they’ve been spoken.  I almost wish people had safety valves on their minds/mouths, that wouldn’t let them take any action or let any words escape until the level of emotion decreases a notch or two, but, alas, that is not the case.  Sigh.  And so we deal with the aftermath and we give it time.

In spite of the stress and strife surrounding us, at the moment, Ed and I managed to have an enjoyable day on our anniversary.  The weather wasn’t suitable (cloudy/rain) for going to the beach, so we postponed our trip to St. Simon’s Island until another day.  However, we did take our usual anniversary trip to Kentucky Fried Chicken to celebrate our 44th.  It was early evening when we got there, so we actually had the entire restaurant to ourselves!  It was quite nice.

While we ate our anniversary meal, we sat and reminisced about some of our past anniversaries.  We’ve had some good ones, so we have lots of good memories.  Like the time Ed’s parents kept our small children just long enough for us to celebrate our anniversary with a quiet steak dinner at home. (It’s the little things, like silence, that mean the most, sometimes!)  Then there was the time our children were finally old enough to stay home alone, so we left them home for the evening, and spent the night in a nearby motel that had a Jacuzzi in it.  On one anniversary we took our daughter, our daughter-in-law, and our two young grandchildren with us to stay in a beachfront condo. (I guess you could say the honeymoon was definitely over at that point. Ha!)  Last, but not least, there was the time we traveled thirty miles or more, off of Amelia Island, just to find a KFC,  then got back to the beach with our picnic supper, only to discover we didn’t have any eating utensils! You can’t eat mashed potatoes and coleslaw without utensils!  Fun times.

The last time I blogged, there were three men on top of our house, taking off old tin, and replacing it with new tin.  They finished the job in only six hours!  Now we have a noisy roof, since the tin tends to ‘pop’ during the hottest part of the day.  The roofer says, “it’s just the tin settling in.”  All I know is we’ve never had any creaks before, unless Ed was up there walking on the roof!  The roofer came back and added a few more screw to the tin, but we still have creaks during the middle of the day.  I hope the tin “settles in” soon.

Father’s Day, 2016, came and went.  It was extra-special [to me] because Ed was still here for us to celebrate with.  I got up in the wee hours of Sunday morning and put a Boston Butt in the crock pot for lunch.  I baked a cake, and attempted to bake some cookies.  We went to church.  Two of our three children, and families, joined us for lunch, while the third stopped by later in the afternoon.  Ed received several nice gifts, and enjoyed all of the attention.  It was a busy day, shortened by the fact that several of our “grands” had to attend a VBS closing program that evening.  Ed and I went to bed early, bone weary tired.

Now the first week of summer is here, and we’ve been spending a lot of it in our garden.  Most mornings are spent picking/shelling peas, while our afternoons are spent canning tomatoes or corn that we also pick each morning.

I need to go to the beach so bad!  (I really need some time in my chair, enjoying the relaxing view) However, my body just isn’t able to make the trip, even if there was time to go.  Actually, we’d planned to go to St. Simon’s Island, today. However,  I’m practically running on fumes, and just didn’t feel like I could make the trip, then come home and deal with more vegetables tomorrow.  I keep telling myself– the beach will always be there, the garden will not (thank goodness).  For now, I’ll comfort myself with that thought–as I hobble back to the kitchen to ‘can’ a few more tomatoes.

 

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